  YOUNG WOMEN VULNERABLE TO BONE LOSS Mothers tell your Daughters......
If premenstrual syndrome has ever caused you to snap at your spouse, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital say you soon may be able to drink your troubles away. No, it's not tequila they're talking about, but a new carbohydrate drink specially designed to raise the level of serotonin in the brain. Nutritional researcher Judith Wurtman knew that animals fed certain mixtures of carbohydrates have higher brain levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood. She suspected that the premenstrual carbohydrate binges many women go on are a clumsy attempt at raising their own serotonin levels, and thought she could find a better way. To test her theory, she and her colleagues spent four months studying a group of 24 women with moderate PMS to see how they responded to three different drinks. All three contained carbohydrates, but only one - a mixture of simple and complex carbohydrates - had been formulated to raise blood levels of the amino acid tryptophan, which has been shown to stimulate the production of serotonin in the brain. Neither the women nor the researchers knew who was getting the drink when. Wurtman found that when the women got the specially formulated drink, life got better: On a combined measure of tension, depression, anger, and confusion, the scores of women getting the test drink dropped by eight points, compared with less than a point when they downed one of the comparison drinks and a gain of one point when they got the other. What's more, the test drink cut the women's cravings for sweet and starchy foods and improved their performance on a memory test. InterNutria, a company in Lexington, Massachusetts, expects to market the drink by the end of the year. It will cost $10 for a five-day supply, enough to last through one menstrual cycle.
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